When it comes to online course design and facilitation, course announcements are often treated as a “nice to have” supplement to instruction, taking a backseat to things like the syllabus, module overviews, and learning pages. Those pages contain valuable information, but announcements offer an opportunity to share content while making personalized connections. However, students often overlook pages that do not appear to contain value to them, including announcements. There's an art and science to crafting valuable announcements that students will want to view. Planning, organization, and frequency play a role in leveraging announcements to be more than unappealing check-ins that students ignore. Here are some effective ways to use announcements to weave student success and a culture of learning into the narrative of your course. Increase Your Presence One of the most common criticisms of online education is the lack of instructor presence. Particularly in large-scale courses, stud...

Although Christians are overrepresented in American society, they are underrepresented in biology careers. What is the reason for this under-representation? Prior research has indicated that Christians feel as though they don’t belong in biology , that some biology instructors make Christians feel as though they have to choose between their faith and biology, and many people incorrectly assume that one has to be an atheist to accept evolution . When biology faculty members were asked whether they would take on a graduate student who was an evangelical Christian, they were less likely to want to hire this person than someone who did not reveal an evangelical Christian identity. These studies indicate that the Christian identity may be stigmatized in the context of academic biology. Because Christianity is an identity that can be hidden or invisible, it could be considered a concealable stigmatized identity (CSI) in the biology community. Concealable Identities Concealable stigmati...

Many STEM students are seeking the opportunity to conduct undergraduate research at some point in their academic career due to its many benefits. However, finding and securing a research position can be challenging, and may be more difficult for some students than others. In a recent publication in the International Journal of STEM Education, researchers interviewed undergraduates who were involved in undergraduate research and students who were not involved but interested in participating in research in order to compare their knowledge on finding and securing research positions at a research-intensive institution ( Cooper et al., 2021 ). How can students find research? Students who were interviewed said that they found research opportunities by talking with instructors, academic advisors, peers, or teaching assistants or by using online university resources. The study found that there were no differences between students who did research and students who wanted to do research in the ...

If you’ve ever scheduled virtual office hours, the first time may have gone something like this:  you picked a nice time slot when you were available, you shared a meeting URL with your students, you tidied up the background of your desk area, you logged in eager to connect with your students to finally get to know some of them, and then… nobody. You may have thought, “The students will be a few minutes late. No one shows up to a party when it starts.” You answered a few quick emails, and then clicked back on the conference to see if anyone silently logged in, only to see your own face filling the screen, aging in real-time. As you dejectedly logged off, you may have wondered if you should switch to “by request only” meetings if your time is so clearly unappreciated (more on that topic later). Most online instructors have some variation on that story, leading to surprise and disappointment when they don’t get to connect with their online students and have some of the personal co...